Friday, June 14, 2013

Kevin Drum listened to the disgraced former Speaker saying about anti-terrorism methods that "people will tolerate it as long as it's genuinely secret." Drum:

Yeah, I guess people will tolerate just about anything as long as they don't know it's happening. This is why Newt is the philosopher king of the Republican Party.

The thing is: Tom P. Baxter (as I like to call him) has always been exactly that same kind of fraud, and it was pretty clear from his presidential campaign that just about every party actor from the precinct level on up knew it, but yet they're still perfectly happy to parade him for the rubes he specializes in fleecing. I mean, we're right to laugh about it, but we also know that Republicans do seem perfectly willing to pretend that Newt is a Wise Man of Conservatives, when they actually know that he's not only not wise, but not particularly committed to being conservative, either.

3 comments:

You know, I'm coming to believe that Gingrich's main value is sort of as a walking Rorschach. That's glib, but let's think on it. A Rorschach, as anyone with any psychological or psychiatric experience knows, is itself meaningless, and therefore great amusement always ensues when people are asked to interpret the shapes - even, or perhaps especially, when the people being tested ought to know better.

Same way with Newt. Somehow, one's response to him seems to illustrate a lot more about oneself than about Newt. For the record, I totally agree with JB. Which simply reveals that we are much alike in many ways. Matthew Dickinson, on the other hand, who surely should know better, last year expressed utter amazement at the lack of respect Newt receives from the press and public intellectuals -- therefore, perhaps, revealing his own feelings of ill treatment at the hands of those two groups.

Newt may not be worth much, but he serves an interesting purpose -- at least now that he is, thankfully, far removed from actual power.

GINGRICH: That's why what Snowden did was very damaging at one level because there are a lot of things a democracy can do to protect itself, as long as they're genuinely secret. And people will tolerate it as long as it's genuinely secret. But it's very difficult to sustain if it becomes overly public because now -- I mean, I'd be very surprised if we weren't gathering an enormous amount of data in Russia.

It sounds like that was merely a throwaway sentence which melded the ideas of how the US protects "itself" generally to how these policies are useless if uncovered and who they were probably targeting. It's the norm on chat shows that dead air is anathema, which is why they fill it with semi-cogent statements and intellectual stuttering. I won't offer CBC quotes because we all already know where the real morons in national politics are to be found.